‘Blessing vs Lesson’…Bad Experiences That Developed into Success Stories

Expert Interviews: Naketa Thigpen, ThigPro – Balance & Relationship Advisor

As a repeated guest to this program, our friend Naketa Thigpen CEO of ThigPro and host of Balance Boldly Podcast, we are taking a different approach to her interviews. 

Gracie and Naketa came together to discuss the Intimacy Advantage and how there is literally an advantage of developing that self-intimacy.   When you're feeling more vivacious and courageous because you're not feeling so drained and exhausted and tired your family, friends, clients, employees, business partners benefit from that positive mood and energy. This brought us to our topic for the day. Naketa shares some of her most vulnerable moments as a businesswoman and how her challenges turned into lessons and became blessings.

Enjoy!

ThigPro

ThigPro Balance and Relationship Management Institute is a Global Personal Development Company, based in the Greater Philadelphia Region.  Providing Business Success Coaching, Balance & Relationship Management, and Leadership Development.  They offer Retreats and Intensives to fast-scaling entrepreneurs and high-performing leaders across industries.

In addition, the Balance Me REMedy formula that sits at the foundation of their proprietary method, allowing them to accelerate client outcomes, they pride themselves on creating deep levels of customer intimacy with all of their clients and official power partners.

The ThigPro Beginnings.

“We started our company as a staffing agency with a professional development arm. The ideal was and is (the brilliant companies are doing it to this day) we said we would have a staffing agency and offer them training as our kind of coffee mug, get in the door…and oh, wow, this training is so awesome kind of concept. We want you to bring all your people here; “that was my thought”.  And then eventually they would want us to train their people for retention purposes. So it was early days and retention, still very personal development base, you know, helping people understand the soft skills of leadership are very valuable, you know, all the things. But I did not understand walking into staffing as the primary goal that that not only was white male-dominated, and I am very feminine in all those ways, right? I didn’t understand the language of a male-dominated space. I work as a psychotherapist prior to that. So you could have no Energy, but they still have to tap into the feminine energy. So there were a lot of things early on that I didn’t understand. And we lost over $100,000 in the first six months of our business, literally the time that we opened the doors, and we officially opened doors in October so we celebrate two birthdays May in October because we had a brick and mortar 1500 square foot building three-year commercial lease, like the whole nine because when I go in, I go all in.”

The Challenge and the Lesson.

“So the first business cards my husband designed for us. He made them where I was President and CEO. And he was, I think, Vice President and COO or something. And I was livid. I was livid at him. Because I said, No, I can’t be president, they’re not gonna respect me. I’ll be VP on paper, and the face of the company I’ll do all the things, which means, behind the scenes, I need you to make sure that you support me and doing other things. But if I need you to come to a meeting, or to get on a phone and email as a presentation of the business you are there. And so he consented to it reluctantly, but he really was frustrated because he was like, you know, I love you and my daughter and my mother and my sister, obviously, but I’m not interested in women, right?  Like, you know, because the professional development arm was really, you know, kind of like women, but it was becoming more and more women focus. He was like, are you serious right now, like, I don’t want to be the president of this. Like, that’s not my passion, this passion, and I’m supporting you and he was he’s always very blunt and direct. My challenge was, he was telling me to step into my power. And I was saying, No, I need to be back here. But then I was giving mixed messages because to your point, if he tried to give me some advice, I’m like, Huh, I’ve been doing this for 12 hours today. No. But I thought I was president. No that’s on paper; it was like this really weird dynamic. So short story shorter being out of alignment, both at home and in-person was part of why we lost that money so fast. And that was a hard lesson. And obviously, it hurt us tremendously financially. Like it ended up snowballing to bankruptcy quite honestly, it took a couple of years, but it was a big snowball to that. I had to struggle with getting clear on my identity, you know, inside the ownership space of who I am as an entrepreneur, what does that really mean? Who, who, who am I?  What does that look like? Am I a clinician trying to play an entrepreneur and I’m an entrepreneur, you know, holding on to being a clinician, like what is happening for you right here. So I did all of those things. In such an emotional rollercoaster.”

The Blessing.

“It was the most priceless, beautiful lesson that I could have ever had.  The blessing in it was the exposure of me. And all the things that I didn't honestly even know I had to work on.  I had no idea.  If you would have asked me in 2011 if I have it all together, I would have been like, have you looked at me lately?  And been very serious about it. You know, not arrogantly, but feeling confident.  And we forget that you can be extremely confident at your level. If you're trying to level up over here, and you still walking over there thinking that you're here, you're out of alignment. And I was totally out of alignment. So I appreciate what, what God allowed. I was angry, I was frustrated, I was hurt. I was literally sick over it. And our marriage really had a hard recovery from that because my husband was like…look at all of our savings. Like that's real talk. We took out retirement plans; we cashed in things to make this thing work. And they had gotten so bad at one point that his check would go in at 6am whatever it did, you know, debits go on to your bank account, right at 6am.  Our pay our payroll was coming out of it because we had a team and he was like, are you kidding me? We have bills, we have priorities, we had things and I had this people-pleasing thing that I had to untether and unthread. And I didn't want to disappoint.”

For more of the conversation between Gracie and Naketa, please refer to the video below:

Tips and Advice from Naketa

Tip/Advice 1

Honor your process. Wherever you are, grieving the loss of your pre-pandemic normal, euphoric about the possibilities that exist around the corner, or even if you caught in a feeling of mediocrity at this moment. Honor where you are as a moment, allowing those feelings to flow through you or risk being anchored to the limitations of now and prolonging the magic that awaits you tomorrow.

Tip/Advice 2

If you can commit to 30-90 days of waking up each morning, grabbing a pen and piece of paper, and writing on it, "what value can I bring to this day?"- then answering it with as much detail as you can process, you start unearthing the best parts of you. There's more to this exercise, which I call the Power of 5, but this first of 5 steps is the most crucial and a beautiful place to begin.

Tip/Advice 3

Lessons mean nothing if we fail to learn from them and keep allowing them to show up in our lives repeatedly. Although you may be as willful as I was (aka stubborn), you don't have to stay entangled in a loop of patterns that are not serving you. If you feel stuck with what they are, perhaps because life has been so layered over the last year or so, take a look at your closest 3 relationships and ask yourself, what did you give to each person last year (and) what did you receive? Many of the lessons you didn't allow in before, will unveil themselves if you answer honestly.

To learn more about Thigpro and the podcast Balance Boldly

Visit us anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts, but Apple is a great place to begin: http://bit.ly/BalanceBoldly

Join us in our free Private Community on Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/certifiedselfish/ to learn more and immerse yourself in the live conversations.

Final Thoughts from Naketa

My final thought is a prayer of peace, your ability to reimagine the version of yourself that lives full out, and the courage to walk towards your greatest self. #LiveFully

Gracie;

Thank you Naketa, for always gracing us with your willing efforts to help others.  Allowing yourself to be vulnerable, in sharing your lessons during your entrepreneurship endeavors.  We look forward to seeing you back again!  

Continue to watch out for more interviews, tips, and advice from amazing experts like Naketa Thigpen.  Naketa is a great friend and will return back for further discussion and will be involved with upcoming events with us, stay tuned!

Naketa, as usual, it’s been a pleasure!

Until next time,

Gracie